The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website. It bills itself as "The world's most resilient bittorrent site" and is ranked as the 85th most popular website in the world and 17th in Sweden by Alexa Internet since 2008 and has over 4 million registered users. According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading". The Pirate Bay allows users to search for and download BitTorrent files (torrents), small files that contain metadata necessary to download the data files from other users.

The torrents are organized into categories: "Audio", "Video", "Applications", "Games", "Other"and "Porn". Normally the "Porn" category is only visible for registered and logged-in users who select the "show pornographic torrents" option in their settings page.

However it is currently not necessary with a workaround, allowing unregistered users to search for the content, but not browse through it. Registration requires an email address and is free; registered users may upload their own torrents and comment on torrents. The website features a browse function that enables users to see what is available in broad categories like Audio, Video, and Games, as well as sub-categories like Audio books, Movies, and Comics.